Make Your Opinions Matter - and Work for You

Everyone has opinions, don’t they? Some you agree with, some might make you angry and others have you saying, “Well, yeah, that’s right!”

Opinion pieces are great PR,
just be sure to handle them correctly.
Photo credit: Igor Zakowski, www.123rf.com

Opinions are read. Have you ever noticed that? And when someone voices an opinion that touches you – whether in strong agreement or strong opposition – you REALLY read it, and then you share it and talk about it with others. You might even send someone a link or a copy of the piece.

This all has a point, especially for small business owners. Opinion pieces and letters to the editor are a great way to get some PR. Besides getting something off your chest, you get your name and your business out into the public eye, too.

And, the real bonus is that you never know who will take an interest and where that piece will go!

Case in point:

Recently a small business owner was expressing an opinion about a small business statistic here in Indiana. He was emotional about it – offended and frustrated. Since I know him quite well, I took the liberty of penning a letter to the editor and sent it to him with the suggestion that it be submitted to several local media outlets.

He agreed so I polished it with finishing touches and off it went. Several publications picked it up and it appeared in print and online.

Over the next several days, he received quite a number of phone calls, emails and comments about it. He was surprised, pleasantly, by the attention. But the most significant result was a call that landed a new client and project.

And it was all because he expressed an opinion that resonated with the community. He took a position and staked a claim.

Expand the reach

There’s more you can do with a published letter to the editor or opinion piece. If you have a mailing list, you have the opportunity to share the published piece with your herd. Use your CRM like AddressTwo to send out an email blast sharing the piece. You can either share the letter or, better yet, share a link to the piece (if it’s online) or in your “In The News” page on your website.

Which illuminates another point. Add the letter to your website with a comment – or an invitation to participate in a dialog. With a static link on your website, you can include the link in your social media editorial calendar for as much or as long as you want.

Do you have an opinion?

Of course you do, we all do. But I want to caution you that this PR opportunity is NOT the place to spout. It is the chance to bring an issue to light and (HERE IS THE IMPORTANT PART) offer a solution or make a suggestion. If you just write a letter to complain, that’s how you may be viewed – as a complainer.

If, on the other hand, you offer a solution or make a suggestion – or, in the above case, offer to participate in a solution – you have the chance to be seen as a leader and problem solver. If your solution is practical and cost-effective, you have hit potential gold. That is because people will stop and consider your solution. If they agree, they may comment or connect with you. If they don’t agree, they may comment or connect with you. Either way, a conversation is started.

And, you can include published letters to the editor in your credentials, too. You are published!

You have a voice – and an opinion. Use it in a productive manner and you may just change something in your sphere of influence for the better and build relationships with new people and new clients. Everyone benefits.

Elaine Whitesides, Whitesides Words

Online Reputations Matter

Everybody knows that the customer service at Xbox Live and Microsoft stinks—even when you have to report serious issues like sexual harassment and threatening behavior. How does everybody know this? Because people talk.

They don’t just talk anymore, though: they type—they type and tweet and update their Facebook pages and leave online reviews on every review site they can find. They email their friends. Those friends tweet, etc.

In the case of Jenny Haniver (see link above), the biggest part of the problem was how far she had to go (posting about the problem publicly and inadvertently creating a media circus around her situation) to get any sort of action taken. Even with repeated calls and emails in to customer service and support teams, she couldn’t find out whether or not her complaint had gotten farther than being registered with the system.

This is not the sort of thing you want people to equate with your company.

The biggest part of preventing this is, obviously, having a stellar customer service team on staff. In addition to being available, you need to train your customer service and support departments on how to help the people who send in feedback feel heard. Imagine how much better Xbox Live could have fared if its team kept customers happy and buying by following up immediately with people who file complaints.

Sure, there’s room to acknowledge that Xbox Live is a huge company and probably has to deal with thousands if not millions of tickets submitted every day. They probably employ a large number of people to handle, at least on a superficial basis, the tickets that get filed. It’s possible that they even outsource a large amount of their customer service duties to call and support centers. They can do that because their company has gotten so big that—even in the wake of this recent slough of bad press—they know that people will keep playing even when they mess up (at least for now).

You probably don’t have that confidence just yet. Unlike Amazon, you don’t have the dough to hire a couple thousand more customer service agents. So what can you do? How do you make sure that your company’s online presence and reputation are as solid and positive as possible?

The best way to ensure that you don’t have to deal with the level of bad press that XBox Live recieved is to be proactive. Solve problems before they can grow. If you don’t have the staff power to take care of that in house, follow the big guys’ leads and outsource those duties to companies like Brand.com who do have the staff on hand to manage your presence and reputation.

Make sure that, whoever you employ to handle your customer service and support—in house or outsourced—understands how to make sure that the person filing the ticket feels taken seriously. How do you do that?

1. Have the team respond immediately and personally. A quick, “thanks for your feedback” note that features the person’s name and a couple of details about their issue will suffice.

2. Follow up. It should be customer service policy that no complaint or raised issues go more than forty eight hours without a follow up. Even if you don’t have anything new to report a simple “we’re still working on it” will get the job done.

3. Keep the person in the loop. Letting the person know what you’re doing to fix the problem goes a long way toward building trust and rebuilding the relationship.

Imagine what would have happened if XBox Live had just used these tips!
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Alex Woods is a freelance writer who most often writes about smart business choices. You can find him on Google+.

Public Opinion and HR Do Not Mix

By David D. Schein, President & General Counsel, 
Claremont Management Group

Chrysler fired auto workers in September 2010 who were filmed on 

local TV news drinking and smoking marijuana on their lunch break. 

Chrysler was responding to public opinion when it took this obvious 

action. Last week, an arbitrator put them back to work. How could 

this miscarriage of justice occur? 

Arbitration is a confidential process, but the word is that 

Chrysler did not have sufficient evidence. Most likely, it could 

have won these cases by following it's own procedures. Generally, 

an employer's policy calls for substance abuse testing when there 

is a reasonable suspicion that an employee is under the influence.

So, supervisors would have had to observe the inebriated behavior, 

not just hear about it on the news. Then,   what ever the testing 

procedure in Chrysler's union contract would need to have  been 

followed. In most cases, this would have been urine analysis. The 

risk here is that a small amount of either alcohol or marijuana 

consumed during lunch might not have reached the minimum cut-off 

level for the testing that was done.  Further, hours or days later 

when the story was aired on TV, it would be too late to test these 

employees. What about the irrefutable film evidence? It might have 

triggered the Supervisors to carefully observe those employees, but 

it would not excuse Chrysler from fully following it's own policies. 

In a non-union environment, Chrysler might have pulled this one off. 

Although, failure to follow a company's own policies might result in 

the terminated employees still getting unemployment benefits. 

 A bitter lesson learned by Chrysler. Profit from another employer's 

mistake and follow your own policies, not the news.